The right to ignorance

An important aspect of privacy is the right to not know what we don’t want to know. This, coupled with the right to protect our private data whether we know or understand the risks are critical to keeping ourselves from simply being “owned” by big data collectors like tech giants, insurance companies or even the government.

In most cases we are actually talking about data that is owned by you and me. We have been careless in giving it away for shiny apps without considering the consequences. In fact, we’ve been giving our data away for so long that we’ve forgotten it’s ours in the first place. Taking it back allows us to individually decide whether there is something we want or don’t want to know. Restoring data to its rightful owners—us—neatly solves many of the hard challenges we’ve discussed. It avoids the need to develop universal, prescient guidelines about data. Instead, millions of individuals will guide their own data usage according to their sense of what is right and wrong. We can all react in real time to evolving uses of data by companies, punishing or rewarding companies according to how their data is treated.